Amazon’s straight-through-processing (“STP”) retail experience provides the company with an edge vs. Google in the AI war:

Visual output from our Amazon Alexa query – “Buy Amazon Echo”:

Consumers may execute the purchase transaction with one or two instructions. This is true for millions of products sold via Amazon’s retail platform. Amazon provides consumers with a holistic retail experience seamlessly combining intelligent, AI-driven product search with order processing and payment processing capability. We believe this integrated retail experience provides Amazon with an edge over Google in product search as well as with AI-powered personal assistants.

Here’s the comparable retail experience using Google’s AI:

The consumer is required to execute multiple additional instructions in order to execute the transaction using Google’s AI as a result of Google not having an integrated retail platform.

AT&T Ought to Be Allowed to Acquire Time Warner “As Is” AT&T (T) ought to be allowed to acquire Time Warner (TWX) “as is” (earlier today AT&T extended the deal close deadline to April 22 2018). It is puzzling why the Justice Department would push back on the deal. We recently covered the topic in…

Sorry Trump Administration. We fail to see how the proposed AT&T / Time Warner Inc. deal would be anti-competitive. Complementary assets and let’s not forgot consumers have the ability to vote with their feet. Welcome to the marketplace.

As the automobile sector transitions to autonomous vehicles we decided to publish our thoughts on prospective segment winners and losers across the automotive ecosystem. Our analysis assumes that the Automotive OEMs have achieved a baseline level of autonomous capability. We expect for the OEMs to develop autonomous capability via a three-pronged approach: 1.) internal R&D, 2.)…

Uber CEO Knew of Breach – Our Advice – Disclose Early

Autonomous Teaser, Uber Data Breach, More M&A

In this edition of the CEORater Podcast we cover:

1.) Autonomous driving teaser..

2.) Perhaps Microsoft (MSFT) ought to acquire Anaplan and other SaaS/cloud Financial Management tools to create an upgrade glide path for Excel? We think so. Infor would do well to follow a similar M&A path.

3.) Uber the latest company to suffer a publicized data breach. We sound like a broken record regarding the subject of Cybersecurity.

4.) Meg Whitman steps down at HPE. IT Services and Technology-Enabled Services companies would be wise to acquire Enterprise Software companies. Such acquisitions would be margin accretive, EPS accretive, would bolster valuations and perhaps most importantly would begin to move the Services vendors out of the commodity services space and into a sector where they would own IP.